Minor offences, for example, street and traffic offences, constitute the vast majority of legal offences that police encounter. In deciding how to deal with these sorts of offences, the use of discretion is pivotal, given that full law enforcement is operationally impractical and counterproductive in terms of welfare objectives and police legitimacy. Yet the ubiquitousness of discretion and the minor nature of these offences often serve to hide the complex and at times problematic nature of discretionary decisions. This article presents a conceptual critique of police discretion in the context of addressing occurrences of minor offences to clarify the challenges faced by street-level police when using discretion in this context. By elaborating a continuum of responses available to police in the Australian jurisdiction of New South Wales, this article reveals the complexity of these decisions within the organisational, ethical and contextual factors that influence them. Drawing on contemporary Australian and international examples and informed by the theory of street-level bureaucracy, the discussion highlights problematic aspects for police in applying discretion fairly, whilst considering the underlying factors and potential responses to these issues. This article contributes a clearer conceptual understanding of how police negotiate the challenges of using discretion when dealing with minor offences and the implications for improved legitimacy, equity and reform.
This article investigates how the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK) have managed to maintain close criminal justice cooperation after Brexit, despite the UK's uneven integration with the EU, best described through the frame of differentiated integration (DI). While much attention is often given to the UK's various opt-outs in this field, the argument here is that the UK, prior to Brexit, shifted from a selective participant to becoming a more engaged partner that actively collaborated within EU judicial frameworks, recognizing the concrete benefits of joint legal and procedural work. The study shows that professionals on both sides not only advocated for retaining as many mechanisms as possible, but also diligently applied the agreed measures and addressed emerging challenges collaboratively. A conceptual discussion illustrates that in this domain, the UK represented a case of aligned DI, where constructivist influences and functional demands fostered deeper convergence with the EU, which persisted beyond its formal membership. The perseverance of judicial cooperation is thus not accidental but reflects a strategic recalibration by the UK, making EU disintegration difficult while fostering its external differentiated (re-)integration.
Through semi-structured interviews conducted with 38 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) employees, the present study analyses how intelligence workers navigate confidentiality keeping and the consequences of secrecy at work and beyond. Through a lens of moral harm, we identify how engaging in secrecy can be morally harmful and how these harms intertwine with psychological, social, and interpersonal harms, with lasting effects on CSIS employees and their relationships with families, friends, colleagues, and the public. We put forth considerations for CSIS in response to their employees’ work experiences, which can prompt moral frustration, distress, harm, and injury. These considerations are situated within the unique circumstances of CSIS employment and its ensuing implications, alongside suggestions for an integration of secrecy in moral injury knowledge, to shape future theorization and new empirical directions.
Sentencing guidelines and commissions have diffused widely across jurisdictions, reshaping the governance of punishment, as documented by Roberts et al.’s state-of-the-art synthesis. Yet Latin America remains a conspicuous “missing case” in this global trend, despite facing some of the world's most acute penal crises. Brazil exemplifies this absence: although its 1940 Penal Code introduced a formally structured sentencing framework, in practice it entrenched expansive discretion and a pattern of punitive consistency, with harsh sentences routinely justified through indeterminate evaluative factors and limited accountability. Drawing on comparative insights and policy-transfer scholarship, this article advances a blueprint for structured sentencing reform in Brazil grounded in structured proportionality, hybrid guideline design, institutional oversight, and resource sensitivity. By situating Brazil within the Global South, the article contributes to international debates on how sentencing reforms can “travel South” and adapt to post-authoritarian, resource-constrained contexts.
This article examines whether Vietnam's prosecution agency functions more as a subject or an object of state power. It traces the evolution of the procuracy from its origins in colonial and Soviet-influenced legal systems to its current role within Vietnam's socialist legal framework. The study highlights the dual nature of the procuracy: serving both as a supervisory body overseeing legal compliance and as a prosecutorial organ charging suspects with crimes. This duality raises questions about its independence, accountability, and potential conflicts of interest. To contextualize Vietnam's model, the article compares it with similar institutions in China and Russia, which have influenced it for nearly seventy years. The findings reveal a hybrid nature: the Vietnamese procuracy conducts public prosecutions and exercises judicial supervision, exerting control over institutions and stages of the criminal justice process. An ongoing debate concerns whether the procuracy should remain a subject of power or become an object of control, reflecting broader ambiguity in Vietnamese criminal procedure about whether the system centers on investigative authorities, courts, or the procuracy itself. The study underscores the importance of developing the procuracy as a power subject with increased authority within Vietnam's framework, while also refining its supervisory role to establish an effective, rule-of-law-oriented criminal justice system under single-party leadership.
Research increasingly shows immigration has neutral or protective effects on community homicide and violence. However, less is known about whether these patterns extend to fatal gun violence. Immigration may uniquely influence such homicides as immigrants often settle in disadvantaged areas with high rates of gun violence, and Hispanic immigrants are frequently linked to gangs in public discourse, which disproportionately contribute to firearm homicides. To address this gap, this study examines nationwide county-level data from the Center for Disease Control mortality reports and the American Community Survey (2000-2015) using negative binomial and fixed-effects models. Findings indicate immigration, including Hispanic immigration, largely protects against firearm homicide with a few exceptions in fixed effects models, which supports the immigrant revitalization thesis and suggests insulating effects of immigration on lethal gun violence.
In Sweden, crime victims may apply for financial compensation through the Crime Victim's Authority (CVA). These payments are intended to provide both material redress and symbolic recognition of harm. Despite its widespread use, little is known about whether compensation processes shape victims' confidence in the justice system. This study examines whether time to compensation is associated with institutional confidence and assesses the extent to which perceived meaningfulness of compensation explains variation in confidence. Using survey data from 213 compensated crime victims, with a final analytic sample of 204 for multivariate models, confidence is modeled as an ordinal outcome and estimated using ordered logistic regression with time-to-compensation categories, demographics, and a composite measure of compensation attitudes. Results indicate that waiting more than 24 months to receive compensation is associated with lower institutional confidence, while more positive evaluations of compensation as meaningful redress are strongly associated with higher confidence. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of both compensation timing and perceived meaning for institutional confidence among CVA recipients.
Eldercide by family caregivers is an underexplored but growing concern in ageing societies. Japan, the most rapidly ageing country in the world, offers an important case for examining this phenomenon. Drawing on 204 cases reported in a major Japanese national newspaper between 2000 and 2024, this study employed a mixed-method content analysis to construct a foundational understanding of eldercide by family caregivers in Japan. Quantitative findings indicate that these cases predominantly involve female victims and male offenders, both typically aged 65 and over. Qualitative analysis uncovered recurring contextual factors, including caregiver burnout, economic hardship, elder abuse, and strained familial relationships. The findings suggest that caregiver eldercide represents a distinct form of domestic homicide shaped by demographic ageing, cultural caregiving expectations, and gaps in institutional support. This study advances homicide scholarship by conceptualizing caregiver eldercide as a unique subtype of family homicide and highlights implications for theory, research, and prevention in ageing societies worldwide.
This article examines United States v. Lawal as forensic ethnography. It reads courtroom transcripts, cooperating witness testimony, and exhibits as cultural artefacts that disclose the symbolic, strategic, and infrastructural logics of hybrid online fraud. The analysis draws on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) testimony, money mule accounts, and prosecutorial framing to explore how romance fraud and Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes converge through shared infrastructures and distributed role allocation. The analysis produced several themes. Here, I foreground three that carry the article's central analytic weight. (1) Hybrid cybercrimes exceed typological boundaries and challenge law enforcement classifications. (2) Cybercriminal identity operates as functionally modular, distributed across multiple actors, accounts, and personas, which enables operational flexibility and risk dispersion. (3) Laundering infrastructures, though sophisticated, remain fragile, reflecting both aspirational and precarious logics of transnational capital flows. The analysis also reveals how offenders linguistically reframed victims as "clients" or "my partner's clients". They deployed commercial vocabulary as a neutralisation strategy that repositioned fraud as a business practice. The article treats legal archives as state-produced knowledge systems and theorises "laundering circuits" and "emotional scripts" as conceptual frameworks. These frameworks illuminate how digital fraud functions as both a dramaturgical performance and a structurally embedded response to global inequality.
The Central American subregion has long been characterized by unique security challenges given high levels of violence and widespread gang influence. Despite the large segment of youth in this subregion, there is a critical gap in understanding youth perceptions of the police. This study conducts a comparative analysis of youth trust in the police in mano dura policing contexts in the north and a preventive policing context in the south of the subregion, each with varying levels of gang presence and influence. The study investigates levels of trust in the police among Central American adolescents in El Salvador (N = 656), Honduras (N = 745), and Panama (N = 659) using cross-sectional data. Results reveal an association between high-risk youth in proximity to gangs and lower levels of trust in the police in Panama. Perceptions of school safety and self-reported substance use are associated with levels of trust in the police in El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama. Findings highlight the distinct nature of former and current pervasive gang contexts in comparison to a more localized gang context in Central America. The article concludes with novel insights and implications for improved youth-police relations across disparate gang and policing contexts.
This study examines the relationship between crime trajectories and housing prices at the micro-geographic level, focusing on street segments in Tel-Aviv-Yafo. It combines two analytic strategies: a quasi-experimental comparison of matched segments using group-based trajectory modeling, and multivariate ordinary least squares regressions predicting logged housing prices. In the quasi-experimental analysis, matched pairs of street segments from a typology of nine crime trajectory groups began with similar crime levels but diverged over time. Segments that experienced steeper increases in crime tended to show slower housing price appreciation. In the multivariate models, a 10-crime increase between 2005 and 2014 was associated with approximately 3-4% decline in price per square meter (2013-2016). These effects remained robust after adjusting for demographic, land-use, and built environment characteristics, and controlling for spatial dependence. The findings advance the criminology of place by showing that crime is a dynamic and spatially concentrated force with measurable economic consequences. From a policy perspective, targeted crime prevention in high-trajectory areas may enhance both public safety and property values.
Mob violence is an emerging threat to the rule of law in Pakistan, often fueled by religious incitement, blasphemy allegations, and perceived failures in the legal system. This study aims to examine the social, legal, and procedural barriers to preventing mob violence in Pakistan from a criminal justice perspective. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 44 elite respondents (judges, lawyers, and police officials), this research explores the underlying causal factors that contribute to mob violence in Pakistan and the systemic limitations of the criminal justice system in addressing this issue. Thematic and cross-referenced analyses reveal an intersection of drivers, including widespread distrust in legal institutions, weak law enforcement capacity, a collective moral justification mindset, and the paradoxical role of religious and tribal leaders as both instigators and mediators. The findings indicate how procedural delays, lack of accountability, and technological deficiencies within the criminal justice system contribute to normalizing extrajudicial actions. The study also illustrates the strategic role played by community influencers in both escalating and de-escalating mob violence, revealing a power imbalance that further undermines formal justice mechanisms. Finally, the study highlights the need for a multidimensional reform approach that includes strengthening police response capacity, regulating religious rhetoric, and accelerating judicial proceedings in order to reinforce Pakistan's criminal justice system.
